WENDY DONIGER O\'FLAHERTY (born November 20, 1940) is an American
Indologist whose professional career has spanned five decades. A
scholar of
SanskritSanskrit and Indian textual traditions, her major works
include, Asceticism and Eroticism in the
MythologyMythology of Siva; Hindu
Myths: A Sourcebook; The Origins of Evil in Hindu Mythology; Women,
Androgynes, and Other Mythical Beasts; and The Rig Veda: An Anthology,
108 Hymns Translated from the Sanskrit. She is the Mircea Eliade
Distinguished Service Professor of
History of Religions at the
University of ChicagoUniversity of Chicago , and has taught there since 1978. She served
as president of the
Association for Asian Studies in 1998.

Since she began writing in the 1960s, Doniger has gained the
reputation of being "one of America's major scholars in the
humanities". Assessing Doniger's body of work, K. M. Shrimali,
Professor of Ancient Indian History at the
University of DelhiUniversity of Delhi ,
writes:

... it (1973) also happened to be the year when her first major work
in early India's religious history, viz., Siva, the Erotic Ascetic was
published and had instantly become a talking point for being a
path-breaking work. I still prescribe it as the most essential reading
to my postgraduate students at the University of Delhi, where I have
been teaching a compulsory course on 'Evolution of Indian Religions'
for the last nearly four decades. It was the beginning of series of
extremely fruitful and provocative encounters with the formidable
scholarship of Wendy Doniger.

Doniger is a scholar of
SanskritSanskrit and Indian textual traditions. By
her self-description,

I myself am by both temperament and training inclined to texts. I am
neither an archaeologist nor an art historian; I am a Sanskritist,
indeed a recovering Orientalist, of a generation that framed its study
of
SanskritSanskrit with Latin and Greek rather than Urdu or Tamil. I’ve
never dug anything up out of the ground or established the date of a
sculpture. I’ve labored all my adult life in the paddy fields of
Sanskrit, ...

Her books both in
HinduismHinduism and other fields have been positively
reviewed by the Indian scholar Vijaya Nagarajan and the American
Hindu scholar Lindsey B. Harlan, who noted as part of a positive
review that "Doniger's agenda is her desire to rescue the comparative
project from the jaws of certain proponents of postmodernism ". Of
her Hindu Myths: A Sourcebook Translated from the Sanskrit, the
IndologistRichard GombrichRichard Gombrich wrote: "Intellectually, it is a
triumph..." Doniger's (then O'Flaherty) 1973 book Asceticism and
Eroticism in the
MythologyMythology of Śiva was a critique of the "Great
tradition Śivapurāṇas and the tension that arises between Śiva's
ascetic and erotic activities."
Richard GombrichRichard Gombrich called it "learned
and exciting"; however, John H. Marr was disappointed that the
"regionalism" so characteristic of the texts is absent in Doniger's
book, and wondered why the discussion took so long. Doniger's
RigvedaRigveda , a translation of 108 hymns selected from the canon, was
deemed among the most reliable by historian of religion Ioan P.
Culianu . However, in an email message,
Michael Witzel called it
"idiosyncratic and unreliable just like her Jaiminiya Brahmana or Manu
(re-)translations."

CRITICISM

Beginning in the early 2000s, a disagreement arose within the Hindu
community over whether Doniger accurately described Hindu traditions.
Together with many of her colleagues, she was the subject of a
critique by
Rajiv MalhotraRajiv Malhotra for using psychoanalytic concepts to
interpret non-Western subjects.
Aditi Banerjee , a co-author of
Malhotra, criticised
Wendy DonigerWendy Doniger for grossly misquoting the text of
Valmiki Ramayana.

Wendy Doniger, a premier scholar of Indian religious thought and
history expressed through Sanskritic sources, has faced regular
criticism from those who consider her work to be disrespectful of
HinduismHinduism in general.

Novetzke cites Doniger's use of "psychoanalytical theory" as

...a kind of lightning rod for the censure that these scholars
receive from freelance critics and 'watch-dog' organizations that
claim to represent the sentiments of Hindus.

Philosopher
Martha NussbaumMartha Nussbaum , concurring with Novetzke, adds that
while the agenda of those in the
American HinduAmerican Hindu community who
criticize Doniger appears similar to that of the Hindu right-wing in
IndiaIndia , it is not quite the same since it has "no overt connection to
national identity", and that it has created feelings of guilt among
American scholars, given the prevailing ethos of ethnic respect, that
they might have offended people from another culture.

While Doniger has agreed that Indians have ample grounds to reject
postcolonial domination , she claims that her works are only a single
perspective which does not subordinate Indian self-identity.

In February 2014, as part of settlement with plaintiff to a lawsuit
brought before an Indian district court,
The HindusThe Hindus was recalled by
Penguin India. Indian authors such as
Arundhati RoyArundhati Roy , Partha
Chatterjee ,
Jeet Thayil , and Namwar Singh inveighed against the
publisher's decision. The book has since been published in
IndiaIndia by
Speaking Tiger Books.

* Hindu Myths: A Sourcebook, translated from the Sanskrit.
Harmondsworth: Penguin Classics, 1975.
* The Rig Veda: An Anthology, 108 Hymns Translated from the Sanskrit
(Harmondsworth: Penguin Classics, 1981).
* (with
David Grene )
AntigoneAntigone (
SophoclesSophocles ). A new translation for
the Court Theatre, Chicago, production of February 1983.
* Textual Sources for the Study of Hinduism, in the series Textual
Sources for the Study of Religion, edited by John R. Hinnells
(Chicago:
University of ChicagoUniversity of Chicago Press, 1990).
* (with David Grene). Oresteia. A New Translation for the Court
Theatre Production of 1986. (Chicago:
University of ChicagoUniversity of Chicago Press,
1988).

That is why, with the exception of Geldner's German translation, the
most reliable modern translations of the Rgveda-W. O'Flaherty's being
one of them-are only partial. However, W. O'Flaherty has, in her
present translation, a wider scope than other scholars – Louis
Renou, for instance, whose Hymnes speculatifs du Veda are a model of
accuracy – who prefer to limit their choice to one thematic set of
hymns. * ^ Taylor 2011 , p. 160.
* ^ The interpretation of gods
* ^ The axis of neo-colonialism, Malhotra Rajiv, World Affairs,
Year : 2007, Volume : 11, Issue: 3, Print ISSN 0971-8052 .
* ^ "
Wendy DonigerWendy Doniger Falsehood".
* ^ A B Christian Lee Novetzke, "The Study of Indian Religions in
the US Academy",
IndiaIndia Review 5.1 (May 2006), 113–114
doi:10.1080/14736480600742668
* ^ Martha C. Nussbaum, The Clash Within: Democracy, Religious
Violence, and India's Future, (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 2009), p. 248
* ^ "I don't feel I diminish Indian texts by writing about or
interpreting them. My books have a right to exist alongside other
books." Amy M. Braverman. "The interpretation of gods",
magazine.uchicago.edu (
University of ChicagoUniversity of Chicago Magazine, 97.2), December
2004; accessed February 14, 2015.
* ^ "Top authors this week"
Hindustan TimesHindustan Times Indo-Asian News Service
New Delhi, October 15, 2009
* ^ Shrimali 2010 , p. 80: "There are several issues that need more
detailed and nuanced analysis rather than straight-jacketed
formulations that we read in The Hindus. These concern terminologies
and chronologies invoked, perfunctory manner in which class-caste
struggles have been referred to — almost casually, complex
inter-religious dialogue seen only in the context of Visnu's avataras,
and looking at the tantras merely in terms of sex and political power.
The work rarely rises above the level of tale telling. On the whole,
this is neither a serious work for students of Indian history, nor for
those with a critical eye on 'religious history' of India, nor indeed
it is the real Alternative History of the 'Hindus'.
* ^ Rocher 2012 , p. 303: "She especially loves to illustrate
ancient stories by interjecting comparisons with situations with which
the audience is familiar: Doniger commands an unbelievably vast array
of comparable material, often, though not always, from American
popular culture. Doniger acknowledges that the book was not meant to
be as long as it turned out to be, "but it got the bit between its
teeth, and ran away from me" (p. 1). Several pages are indeed filled
with "good stories" that are only loosely, some very loosely, related
to the history of the Hindu religion. Going into detail on the
drinking and other vices of the Mughal emperors, even though carefully
documented, is a case in point (pp. 539-41). ...When it comes to legal
history in the colonial period in particular, there are passages that
are bound to raise ... eyebrows. ... the history of Hindu law was more
complex than is represented in this volume. Anglo-Hindu law was far
more than "the British interpretation of Jones's translation of Manu."
* ^ James F. DeRoche, Library Journal, 2009-02-15
* ^ David Arnold. "Beheading Hindus And other alternative aspects
of Wendy Doniger's history of a mythology", Times Literary Supplement,
July 29, 2009
* ^
David Dean Shulman , \'A Passion for Hindu Myths,\' in New York
Review of Books , Nov 19, 2009, pp. 51–53.
* ^
Pankaj Mishra , "\'Another Incarnation\'", nytimes.com, April
24, 2009.
* ^
A R Venkatachalapathy , "Understanding Hinduism" The Hindu
March 30, 2010
* ^ "
National Book Critics Circle Finalists Are Announced",
blogs.nytimes.com, January 23, 2010.
* ^ HAF Urges NBCC Not Honor Doniger\'s Latest Book, as reprinted
in the Los Angeles Times, The New Yorker and Sify
* ^ "Penguin to destroy copies of Wendy Doniger\'s book \'The
Hindus\'"
The TimesThe Times of
IndiaIndia
* ^ "Penguin to recall Doniger’s book on Hindus"
The HinduThe Hindu
* ^ "How Doniger’s now-recalled ‘The Hindus’ ruffled Hindutva
feathers" firstpost.com
* ^ "Academics, writers decry Penguin\'s withdrawal of Doniger\'s
book, The Hindus", timesofindia.indiatimes.com; accessed February 14,
2015.
* ^ Buncombe, Andrew. "
Arundhati RoyArundhati Roy criticises Penguin for pulping
The Hindus: An Alternative History".
The IndependentThe Independent . Delhi.
Retrieved February 14, 2015.
* ^ B Mahesh (8 December 2010). "Doniger’s Hindus returns, 20
months after its withdrawal". Pune Mirror. Retrieved 16 December 2015.